Twitter verification shenanigans: gold edition
Does a two week old website and a specific shade of orange truly constitute an "organization"?
Twitter recently rolled out a new verification feature for organizations, which bestows a gold checkmark on an organization’s primary Twitter account and additionally grants the organization the ability to verify affiliated accounts, which receive both a Twitter checkmark and an organization-specific affiliate badge. As with the $8 Twitter Blue verification system, the launch of organizational verification has not been without hitches — on one occasion, a gold checkmark was bestowed upon a fake Disney Junior account, for example.
More recently, an account with the handle @thisisorange and the biography “proof of #bitcoin” was granted a gold verified organization checkmark by Twitter. The sole evidence of the existence of the “organization” in question is the website linked in @thisisorange’s profile, orange.associates, which was registered just two weeks ago.
The orange.associates website offers the option for anyone with a Twitter account to become an affiliate of the “organization” simply by providing a Twitter handle and connecting a cryptocurrency wallet. Scrolling through the @thisisorange account’s Affiliates tab reveals that the account has racked up a massive number of affiliates, all sporting blue checkmarks and orange square affiliate badges. Almost all of these affiliates appear to be cryptocurrency/NFT-themed accounts. According to a June 3rd, 2023 tweet from @thisisorange, the total number of affiliate accounts exceeds 25000.
Although the orange.associates website is only two weeks old, the @thisisorange Twitter account has been around substantially longer, since February 2022. However, the account wasn’t named @thisisorange at the time it was created; instead it had the handle @wassiefed and the display name “smolting (not fed”) as opposed to “FF6000”. We can tell that this is the same account as the account currently named @thisisorange because Wayback Machine archives from February 2022 for @wassiefed have the same permanent numeric ID (1489092486781972482) as the account currently named @thisisorange. (The account readopted the display name “smolting (not fed)” on June 5th, 2023, but the handle is still @thisisorange at the time of this writing.)
The @thisisorange “organization” has been promoted by a variety of cryptocurrency accounts, some of which have Twitter Blue checkmarks. Some of the tweets promoting @thisisorange very rapidly gained tens of thousands of retweets from a network of spam accounts. The spam accounts are all old accounts created prior to 2016, and all of them took a Twitter break of at least six years prior to 2023. These accounts, which tweeted via a variety of apps before their multi-year nap, all now tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App. This evidence strongly suggests that the accounts in question were hacked, purchased, or otherwise transferred from their original owners to a new entity.
All of this network’s recent content is retweets. The accounts retweeted are all very similar-looking cryptocurrency accounts, almost all of which have “eth” in their names and tens of thousands of followers. These accounts promote a variety of cryptocurrency projects (including the aforementioned @thisisorange verified Twitter “organization”).
During the course of harvesting data for this analysis, six of the twenty accounts most frequently retweeted by the network were suspended and two were renamed. For now, the gold check @thisisorange account itself remains online, but it has not tweeted since June 4th, and it is presently search banned.
This article will be updated should the situation evolve further.
Update: as of June 30th, 2023, the @thisisorange Twitter account has lost its gold verification checkmark.
This research was originally presented in this pair of Twitter threads: